Society’s progression
I’ve railed against utilitarianism before now: speaking as a philosopher who’s trying to build things up from little, I’m against basing the entirety of morality on happiness primarily because this means the ends always justify the means if the end result maximises happiness for the maximum number of people. However, in having a discussion over the ideal society the other day, I realised that I don’t seem to follow this. In fact, I’m actually far from it: I often seem to be arguing for a society where there is as little suffering as possible. In said discussion, I was trying to make the point that I’d rather see a world where no-one was in poverty or suffered a poor standard of living, even if there were members of that society not pulling their weight, by not working when they could do so. My opposition said that they would rather see what they called a fair world, where everyone had the opportunity to take part in society and those who didn’t would rightly face the consequences of poverty. I’m talking about those who can work but choose not to: not those who can’t due to disability etc. My opponent asserted that the UK right now is pretty good at providing such opportunities even though there are improvements to be made. My first thought is that this is unrealistic, but I don’t really know about, so I shall leave such empirical arguments behind.
So I was arguing for a society where people were individually better off even if they didn’t deserve it in the standards of many other members of said society. Why? Because they would be happier, and because I don’t see the rest of that society as having any right to take such basic rights of a decent standard of living away, because we’ve had too much poverty and suffering in the human race already. But this is effectively utilitarianism: I’m arguing that the duty of contributing to one’s society is less important than the outcome of happiness for all. However, I believe I can reconcile this apparent hole. The reason I want to allow everyone to have basic rights at all costs is one of liberty: people must be in a position where they can be individuals if we are to be in a position where society is exposed to as many possible variations of humanity as possible, because this is the only way we can hope to achieve a better society on whatever scale of betterment you choose to use. Many would use happiness, I’m not sure yet.
I am having other general problems with my arguments for morality. One thing I particularly hold to is the importance of intentions. To me, given that the only thing people have control over is what they aim to do, this is the only thing that can possibly be used to judge them. It’s not reasonable to punish someone for causing great misery when they didn’t intend to because there’s no point: it’ll just make them suffer when they can’t do anything about it. This suggests that now is very important. It’s not what happens in the future, it’s what we do now that defines us, what we choose to do or not do. But we make choices about what to (try and) do now based on what we are aiming for in the future, so I’m not actually making any kind of progress on things. I attack consequentialism for aiming at future ends rather than worrying about the means needed to achieve them for always looking into a future and never ‘landing’ somewhere. But actually, I end up in the same problem myself.
This isn’t flowing properly today so I’ll leave it there.
It seems that the best solution to your problem is to accept a synthesis of the two extremes of sole-consequentialism and solely-deontological ethics.
I would argue that we seem to use a mixture of outcome and intention when judging people’s actions anyway; if I am upset and you jokingly throw a juggling ball at me, I am liable to become angry because of the outcome, despite the intention; but if I am in high spirits, and you do the same, I am more likely to laugh and throw it back—thus ignoring the outcome in favour of the intention.
Riffing on what you said in your last paragraph (“we make choices about what to (try and) do now based on what we are aiming for in the future”), if a government policy intended to reduce childhood poverty has instead raised it, then the intention is worthless; it is the facts of the matter we must contend with. It clearly wasn’t the right policy to take in pursuit of its aims. Though I understand this wanders a little bit from the area of ethics, it is still relevant.
The legal system also uses a mixture of intent and outcome; if you accidentally crash a car and kill someone, you still do time for it, since it is widely judged that outcome was bad enough for that. If you possess certain drugs, you get one fine, or if you possess “with intent to deal”, you get another.
Any ethical musings that start by setting down what the basis for morality should be, rather than paying attention to how people use it, are going to fall foul of taking extreme and one-sided views of human nature.